Mirror Project Proposal (2008)

- The "Mirror Project" was a 2008 proposal by cyberlaw scholar Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard/Berkman Center) to create a permanent, publicly accessible archive of the Web, preserving snapshots of websites over time so future researchers could study digital culture and history. - It was a direct precursor to what later became known as web archiving efforts; the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine already existed (founded 1996), but the Mirror Project proposed a more systematic, academic-governed infrastructure with legal and ethical safeguards for collecting and storing web content. - The proposal explicitly grappled with tensions between comprehensive preservation and respect for website owners' rights (e.g., robots.txt exclusions, opt-out mechanisms) — a debate that continues in web archiving and AI training-data circles today. - This document is historically significant as a snapshot of early thinking about digital preservation, before social media and app-based ecosystems made the web far harder to archive.